LONGMONT -- "For sale: 26.81-acre campus in the heart of Longmont. Zoned mixed-industrial but that could be subject to change. Owner cutting ties to city -- will be priced to move! Amenities include existing grid of streets, on-site access to rail, future transit station nearby and unrivaled visibility. Seven lots, all in close proximity. A redeveloper's dream!"

That may not be exactly the way the ad will read when Butterball puts its turkey processing plant and surrounding properties on the market, but it's a pretty fair description of the way the city of Longmont sees the property.

What was once the city's largest employment hub saw its first big job losses in 2008, when Butterball, two years after buying the plant and surrounding turkey farms from ConAgra, announced it would no longer slaughter and process turkeys in Longmont. That led to the loss of 491 jobs by the end of that year.

The past three years the company has had the Longmont plant producing "value-added" turkey products, such as turkey hot dogs and ready-to-eat frozen turkey roasts.

Then in September, North Carolina-based Butterball, whose most western plant besides Longmont is in Missouri, announced it was shutting down the Longmont facility at the end of the year, costing the remaining 350 workers their jobs.

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The move presents a redevelopment opportunity unlike the city has ever seen.

"There's probably not another food processor that's going to come in and, you know, take over the keys," said Brad Power, the city's economic development director. "How are they going to handle (the sale)? Are they going to parcel that out, or are they going to sell it in one big piece? After all, it's First and Main, and that's an address that has some distinction."

Butterball site now part of TOD study

An 11.8-acre lot at 301 First Ave. is the largest single parcel of the seven that Butterball owns.
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LEWIS GEYER
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According to city records, Longmont was one soul shy of 8,100 people in 1950 when a company called Longmont Foods opened a turkey processing plant along the railroad tracks at First Avenue and Main Street. As the city grew up around it, the plant grew to be, at one time, the city's largest private employer, peaking in the mid-1990s at around 1,500 employees. Along the way it also expanded its physical presence, which now includes seven parcels ranging in size from 11.79 acres to about three-quarters of an acre.

"You're separated by streets and railroad (tracks), so I guess this makes it more challenging (from a redevelopment standpoint)," said David Starnes, the city's economic redevelopment manager.

Starnes, who started his job in Longmont a year ago this month, is a key player from the city's standpoint because of his experience in just these kinds of projects. While the private-sector company he last worked for was based in the Washington, D.C., area, he has spent a lot of time along the Front Range working on similar redevelopments.

"Before, I would be on the other side, doing consulting for the city," Starnes said. "Now I'm on the team with the city."

Tim Baldwin is the consultant Longmont hired to conduct a transit-oriented development study around First Avenue and Main Street, which will be the site of a future RTD transit station.

RTD has already committed up to $17 million for the station, which will begin as a bus hub but will ultimately be the end-of-the-line stop for FasTracks' northwest corridor route.

"We're looking at long-term improvements (to that area)," said Baldwin, a project manager with Steer Davies Gleave, a company specializing in transit-oriented development and redevelopment. "That's the real key -- we're looking at a 20- to 25-year development plan."

Baldwin had already begun his study when Butterball made its announcement. That news certainly broadened the scope of the study, he said.

"We knew that the Butterball plant wasn't going to be there forever, but all of a sudden it gave us the opportunity to think about it short-term instead of just long-term," he said.

Added Starnes, "What's really important is looking at the adjacency of where this property is located in the city. And in this case, it's downtown -- that's two blocks away. And you also want to look at what's going on around it, and in this case it's the First and Main transit station. It's right across the street."

Type of redevelopment remains to be seen

Though Butterball is shuttering its operations, the future home of the transit station will still be on the west side of Main, according to Phil Greenwald, the city's transportation planner.

"(RTD) is really not interested in having to cross Main Street for a variety of reasons," Greenwald said. "They said possibly we could do some parking over on that side but the main platform would have to stay on the west side."

One of the Butterball parcels, a parking lot, is on the west side of Main just north of where the transit station will go, Greenwald noted.

Power said he and his economic development team have offered to work with Butterball any way it can, once the plant's closed. Internally, city staff has discussed a wide variety of potential scenarios, Power said, including the possibility of the city buying the property and then selling it to a private entity that would redevelop it.

"I think there's all kinds of things that could be on the table, and that could certainly be one of them," Power said. "I don't want to rule anything in or out.

"Obviously, if there were a buyer that had a vision for that property that wanted to buy it as a whole, that obviously makes it a lot easier."

Power said the city would prefer Butterball sell the entire 27 acres in one piece, as opposed to parceling it out, but ultimately that's the company's decision.

"That's all still in front of us," Power said/ "I think conceptually, the thinking is, maybe the industrial use has run its course."

One who agrees with that statement is Frank Kelley, senior vice president of CBRE, a commercial real estate firm. Kelley, who has helped broker many large deals along the Front Range, said that having rail at the Butterball property is only helpful in terms of a FasTracks station across the street. Any commercial user needing heavy rail service is unlikely to be attracted to that location, Kelley said.

But the transit station makes the property a prime candidate for some sort of mixed-use redevelopment, he said.

"That's what has succeeded in southeast Denver," Kelley said. "A mixed-use development contiguous or across the street from a mass transit station.

"Studies have shown those fill up faster (with tenants) than anything else."

Starnes said that once Baldwin's study is completed, probably in late spring, it can serve as a "guiding document" for what might become of that area.

One thing he can't do today is predict what the study might say about what makes the most sense in terms of redevelopment. "Some may be more employment-based; some may be more retail-based; some may be more commercial-based," he said. "The whole thing about transit stations is creating these kinds of nodes, or hubs of activity."

Several years ago the city of Longmont created a 580-acre urban renewal area for the southeast part of the city but only a portion of the Butterball property is within the URA boundaries. The rest of Butterball's land lies within the Longmont Downtown Development Authority's General Improvement District.

Both urban renewal and general improvement districts can aid in expediting redevelopment of a property such as Butterball's.

"I think that of all the places on the Front Range, I think Longmont is one of the best to work with on a redevelopment such as this one, which is complicated," said CBRE's Kelley. "It's going to take a lot of cooperation."

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